Users of the world, unite! The challenges and opportunities of Social Media
Section snippets
The specter of Social Media
As of January 2009, the online social networking application Facebook registered more than 175 million active users. To put that number in perspective, this is only slightly less than the population of Brazil (190 million) and over twice the population of Germany (80 million)! At the same time, every minute, 10 hours of content were uploaded to the video sharing platform YouTube. And, the image hosting site Flickr provided access to over 3 billion photographs, making the world-famous Louvre
What is Social Media—And what is it not?
As highlighted, the idea behind Social Media is far from groundbreaking. Nevertheless, there seems to be confusion among managers and academic researchers alike as to what exactly should be included under this term, and how Social Media differ from the seemingly-interchangeable related concepts of Web 2.0 and User Generated Content. It therefore makes sense to take a step back and provide insight regarding where Social Media come from and what they include.
By 1979, Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis
Collaborative projects
Collaborative projects enable the joint and simultaneous creation of content by many end-users and are, in this sense, probably the most democratic manifestation of UGC. Within collaborative projects, one differentiates between wikis—that is, websites which allow users to add, remove, and change text-based content—and social bookmarking applications—which enable the group-based collection and rating of Internet links or media content. Exemplary applications within this category include the
Ten pieces of advice for companies deciding to use Social Media
Social Media is a very active and fast-moving domain. What may be up-to-date today could have disappeared from the virtual landscape tomorrow. It is therefore crucial for firms to have a set of guidelines that can be applied to any form of Social Media, whether they are part of the aforementioned list or not. Next, we provide such a set of recommendations. Given that Social Media have both a social- and a media-component, we split our advice into two sections: five points about using media and
Nothing to lose but their chains
Today, everything is about Social Media. Some industry gurus claim that if you do not participate in Facebook, YouTube, and Second Life, you are not part of cyberspace anymore. Social Media allow firms to engage in timely and direct end-consumer contact at relatively low cost and higher levels of efficiency than can be achieved with more traditional communication tools. This makes Social Media not only relevant for large multinational firms, but also for small and medium sized companies, and
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